The Girl Cut in Two

The Girl Cut in Two asks us to empathize with Ludivine Sagnier, an attractive and capable young woman torn between the adulterous lecher who whores her out to his buddies and the murdering child molester who wants her for his very own.

How very French.

Thing is, I’m not French.  The lecher creeped me out.  The murderer scared me.  The woman, well, I didn’t understand her.  These two men aren’t the only two men in the world.  I couldn’t understand why she didn’t tell both of them to hoof it and go find herself a nice young man who was neither an emotional nor physical threat to herself or others.

So there I sat, watching characters I didn’t care about behave in ways I didn’t understand.  Oh, and looking at my watch.  The Girl Cut in Two gave me no “in,” no one to root for, and nothing to care about.  It looked professional, Ludivine Sagnier is a great beauty, and I enjoyed see The Transporter’s François Berléand play the lecher.  In the end, however, these people behaved in ways that made no sense to me and that I couldn’t imagine.

Then again, I’m not French.

Legend of the Fist: Return of Chen Zhen

Legend of the Fist: The Return of Chen Zhen is an outstanding kung fu picture and an outstanding bit of agitprop.

Donnie Yen (the Ip Man films, the Iron Monkey films, Blade II, Hero, Shanghai Knights) follows in the footsteps of Bruce Lee and Jet Li as the titular hero in this third Chen Zhen film (Lee originated the role in Fist of Fury and Li played him in Fist of Legend.).  Yen, gifted with extraordinary speed and agility, is a formidable martial artist and a charismatic performer.  Through a combination of world-class editing, practical stunts, wirework, and seamlessly executed CGI, Legend of the Fist turns him into a just-that-side-of-superhuman hero.  The film puts him into a variety of brilliantly choreographed fights, one of which even includes a “tribute to Bruce Lee” nunchuck bit that brought a huge smile to my face.  Oh, and bonus: Yen can act!  Shu Qi (The Transporter, So Close) plays the love interest and, well, I’d watch her fold laundry for 90 minutes.  Anthony Wong Chau-Sang, (Vengeance, the Infernal Affairs movies), plays a sympathetic nightclub owner, and he’s steadily rising in my estimation.  I’m going to start looking for movies on the strength of his name.  Director Andrew Lau (the really quite good Infernal Affairs movies) knows how to direct action, and he knows how to direct acting.  He’s created a very slick, very good, very professional kung movie.  I loved it on those merits alone.

But Legend of the Fist has a whole other thing going on.  Chen Zhen’s story takes place during the period of Chinese history called the Warlord Era, between World Wars One and Two.  The once-proud nation was divided and weak and easy prey for both Western powers, who sought commercial exploitation, and Japan, who wanted an empire.  Anyone who wants to understand contemporary Chinese political thought and international strategy needs to understand this time -- it has become a touchstone of Chinese identity.  This was the time when the proud kingdom was on its knees, when tiny Japan maligned it as the “weak man of Asia.” When Legend of the Fist begins, Chen Zhen and his comrades are in Europe, fighting WWI with the Allied Powers.  The film tells us they had no military training and were sent as laborers, digging trenches and hauling ammunition.  Of course, they get shot and blown up just easily as the white men carrying the rifles.  When the war concludes, China’s ignored in Versailles and its erstwhile allies look the other way as Japan begins its conquest.  Chen Zhen becomes a resistance leader, fighting the evil Japanese and standing up for Chinese national pride.  He and his allies humiliate the Japanese.  They humiliate the corrupt English police chief who, when humbled, mumbles an American-inflected “whatever.”  Chen Zhen, thus, becomes a symbol of modern Chinese nationalism, of a nation fighting complacent Western and Western-allied powers for respect.  Chen Zhen wins.

I imagine this goes over hugely well with Chinese audiences and, for that matter, with the Chinese government.  But you don’t have to be Chinese to groove on the fantastic action, the very good performances, and the intellectual exercise of analyzing nationalist film’s place in modern China.  I thought Legend of the Fist: The Return of Chen Zhen was fantastic.  If you like this genre, I think you’ll love it, too.

Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench

As longtime readers of this blog (Hi, Mom!) will know, I’m not particularly bright.  This is why I spent a healthy portion of Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench asking, “What’s going on now?”

See, here’s the deal:  the movie begins with Guy and Madeline on a park bench.  They appear to be breaking up.  An intertitle comes up, saying “Some time earlier,” or something to that effect.  Guy and Madeline, a pale brunette, are together.  Then Guy’s with some other pale brunette.  Is this different actress portraying a different aspect of Madeline’s personality?  Is this Guy’s next girlfriend?  The girlfriend before?  What’s going on?

I literally had no idea.  All I knew is that I was watching a 16mm, B&W film with a great jazz soundtrack and some good song ‘n dance numbers that suffered from being overenunciated (Madeline, tell your voice coach to get bent and sing like a human being.  At least, I think that was Madeline.  It could have been the other pale brunette.).  Was it original?  Yeah.  Was it particularly interesting?  Well, I liked the music, and I imagine that a Bostonian would dig the local setting and the Bostonianisms.  But I had a hard time telling the pale brunettes apart and I spent a healthy portion of the film in a state of mystification.

I feel badly about it, because I often complain about the dullness of the factory-built 3-act film.  Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench, filmed in a vérité style and having the guts to try something different, deserves great credit on that account.  I just wish I were brighter.  Perhaps then, I could have kept up.

Bad Boy Bubby

Ugly, crude, and intentionally shocking, I hated Bad Boy Bubby in a way I haven’t hated a film in years.

The picture, a 1993 Australian import and multiple Australian Film Institute Award winner, centers on a man who’s been raised like an animal, abused and imprisoned in a basement for thirty-five years.  When he finally makes it to the outside world, he does his unhinged best to cope.

But the outside world, like the basement and the people in it, is ugly and coarse and horrible.  This is intentional, as Bad Boy Bubby seeks to shock and dismay.  But you know what?  I do a lot of traveling around the world, and I’ve seen my share of ugly and coarse and horrible.  I don’t need it in my entertainment, and I don’t need to see Bad Boy Bubby ever again.  Goodbye.

Wild Target

In Wild Target, Bill Nighy plays an uptight assassin who accepts a contract on manic pixie dream girl (MPDG) Emily Blunt.  But there’s a problem: Emily Blunt is too smart to play a MPDG.  Something about her eyes doesn’t let her do “carefree and irresponsible.”  She looks like she’s faking it.

Nighy never looks like he’s faking anything, and he makes for a fine straight man in this British comedy.  Rupert Grint shows up as a hapless stoner and displays good comic timing, as does Rupert Everett as a very angry villain and Martin Freeman as a competing assassin.  Unfortunately, we never really buy Blunt in the Zooey Deschanel role, and this sucks the air out of the proceedings. 

It’s too bad, really.  I’d buy Ms. Blunt as a detective or a scientist or the Queen of England.  But she just doesn’t have MPDG in her.  Here’s hoping that next time, she chooses a role more in line with her strengths.

13 Assassins

13 Assassins is as good as movies get.

The picture, a “men on a mission” story set in pre-Meiji Japan, opens with a samurai committing seppuku, a ritualized form of suicide in which the individual disembowels himself.  It’s incredibly difficult and painful, and 13 Assassins presents it in all its horror by not showing it to us at all.  We see the samurai prepare, then we see his face in closeup as he goes through agonizing pain and exertion.  Understand that seppuku was normally committed with a “second” standing by, sword raised to decapitate the samurai after he makes the first cut, to spare the man the agony of disembowelment.  This man has no “second.”  Music plays, sound effects suggest what’s happening below the frame, and our stomachs curl and our hands clench and our hearts break for this man.  We’re only two minutes into this movie, and we feel moved and involved and completely engaged in the world of the samurai and the repercussions of this act.  Later, another samurai commits the same act under different circumstances.  He has a “second,” and this suicide takes on an entirely different aspect of nobility and technical excellence in its portrayal.

I’m not arguing that suicide is cool.  I’m saying that seppuku was a part of feudal Japanese culture, and that 13 Assassins approaches this subject dramatically, artfully, and with perfect technical execution.  I use the film’s portrayal of seppuku to illustrate what the film does throughout its 2 hour and 21 minute run time: it nails feudal Japan, from its social structure to its mythology to its code of honor and even to its view of suicide.  It does so with class when appropriate and with horror when appropriate, and it does so with the absolute surety.

13 Assassins is not some kind of Merchant-Ivory historical fetishization.  That first seppuku propels a “mission” film that rocks every beat, from the gathering of the team to the cohesion on the road to the laying of the traps to a final battle that compares with the absolutely fundamental Seven Samurai.  Its characters are interesting.  Its jokes are funny.  Its action set pieces, including the aforementioned (45-minute long) final battle, are both cool and comprehensible.  This is a good time at the movies.

Credit director Takashi Miike, whose Ichi the Killer and the short film “Box” from Three Extremes suggested talent, but not on this level.  Kôji Yakusho, aging very well since 1996’s Shall We Dance?, is suitably wise and commanding in the Takashi Shimura ‘Samurai Leader’ role.  Gorô Inagaki, new to me, does petulant villainy as well as I’ve ever seen it done and gives us a character we can really love to hate. 

Y’know, I could go right down the credits list, telling you how great everything and everyone is.  I could probably figure out a way to compliment the Key Grip.  But here’s the bottom line: 13 Assassins is a flat-out classic, successful in every way.  If you care about movies, you need to see this as soon as you can.

Exit Through the Gift Shop

Greg Sorenson nailed his review of Exit Through the Gift Shop, and he's graciously permitted me to reprint it here.  Enjoy.

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"Street Artist" Banksy cobbles years of footage of himself, Shepard Fairey, and other graffiti/stencil artists doing their thing, all meticulously documented by a compulsive videographer named Thierry Guetta. In the course of making the film (more accurately, in the course of wrenching Guetta's footage away from him and turning it into something usable), Banksy convinces Guetta to go do some street art of his own. He adopts the persona "Mr. Brainwash" and does a little street-stencil work before hiring a stable of designers and artists to churn out a ton of derivative pop art, displaying it all in a huge, wildly successful 2008 art exhibition.

Or does he? Long before Exit Through the Gift Shop was released, rumors were circulating that Mr. Brainwash was a hoax put on by Fairey and/or Banksy. Guetta is quite the character. Artistically he's akin to Mark Borchardt and Tommy Wiseau, but does appear, at least, to be very good at turning trash into cash -- he's first shown putting hundred-dollar tags on "vintage" clothes at his trendy LA boutique. He's maybe a little too good at this to be real; as the years of videography go on, and then as his (seemingly very expensive) art show comes together, I thought at least once, "where's this money coming from again?"

If Mr. Brainwash is indeed a hoax, does that make EThGS a mockumentary? I don't think so, It's still about creating subversive art, and it's quite possible that Banksy has documented a creation of a human installation

Monsters

Monsters posits a world in which extraterrestrial animals wind up in Northern Mexico.  US and Mexican authorities establish a “quarantine zone,” in which they use chemical and conventional weapons to try to eliminate enough creatures so they don’t gain a foothold in our ecosystem.  The film convincingly creates and ages this world, making us feel that this isn’t a new phenomenon and that the two governments have been fighting the monsters for quite some time.

Our audience surrogates in this alternate world are a news photographer and his charge, the boss’s (adult, and rather fetching) daughter.  They’re trapped on the wrong side of the quarantine zone, you see, and they need to get to America.  Why they don’t just catch a commercial flight from Mexico City is never explained, but just play along – Monsters is trying to tell a story, here.

What happens?  Well, it’s kind of a mix of It Happened One Night and Sin Nombre, with the two Americans hiring a gang of coyotes to escort them through the quarantine zone and across the US border.  Is it good?  It’s fine, I suppose, but I never bought into it.  This isn’t because the film makes Northern Mexico look like Central America, and it isn’t because it places a Mayan pyramid within walking distance of the Texas border.  It’s because the movie couldn’t decide if it wanted to be Apocalypse Now, any of a dozen movies about illegal immigration, or the aforementioned Frank Capra movie.  And you know what?  I could have accepted that if it weren’t for the film’s big, climactic moment, the moment in which we’re supposed to feel awed at the aliens’ beauty and empathy with their plight as unwanted interlopers.  See, all I saw were creatures of Lovecraftian horror that needed to be eliminated, even if it meant the irradiation of all of Northern Mexico and much of South Texas to make that happen.

I can credit Monsters for originality and craft.  Its aliens look alien and its world looks convincing.  But in the end, it’s just a road movie with an unsuccessful climax.  Pass this one by.

Ink

Ink is bold and creative and a fantastic example of what someone can do with vision, originality, and a $250,000 budget.

In the world of Ink, we live surrounded by beings much like angels and demons.  The angels come to us in our sleep and renew us with sweet dreams and good hopes.  The demons come, as well.  They bring nightmares and horror.  Some demons even steal souls.

Ink, short for Incubus, is just such a soul-stealer.  Hunched and ragged, he lays hands on a sleeping little girl and whisks away her soul while her father concerns himself with other things.  Ink wants to bring the soul to his masters as a sacrifice.  Can the angels stop him in time, and can they save the father’s soul in the bargain?

This is a great idea for a story, and Ink overcomes its budget restrictions to tell this story in a fantastical and compelling way.  The angels and demons are martial artists, which makes for great battles between them.  While the angels are your basic attractive young people, the demons are truly horrifying and otherworldly, with a design unlike anything you’ve seen before.  Further, Ink contrasts the spirit world and the real world with music, lighting, and set design that accentuates the difference, particularly when illustrating the hopeless, horrifying world of demonkind.

Yes, the script has some jarring moments, and the performances range from pretty good to “somebody’s parents must have put up some production money.”  Nevertheless, Ink stands as a successful low-budget film that serves as an object lesson in how to stretch $250k.  It creates a convincing world, uses that world to explore themes of duty and love, and delivers an entertaining night at the movies.

Good job, Writer / Director / Composer /  and, for all I know, Craft Services Guy Jamin Winans!  I look forward to seeing what you do next.

Vengeance

Johnnie To walks into a production meeting.

“Guys, here’s the idea: our heroes, triad assassins with hearts of gold, are in a field, hiding behind big bales of scrap paper and surrounded by bad guys hiding behind big bales of scrap paper.  The bad guys roll their bales in front of them, as a moving shield.  The heroes roll their barrels at the bad guys, guns blazing.  Colorful scraps of paper blow in the breeze.  Music plays.  Blood everywhere.  It’s magnificent.”

Kai-fai Wai, To’s collaborator and business partner, is the only man in the room with the courage to question the great Hong Kong director and producer.  He says, “Sounds great, Johnnie.  What’s the story?”

“Story?”  says Johnnie.  “Who cares?  Listen to this: the good guys track the bad guys down to their meeting place in the woods.  They close in for their shootout, O.K. Corral style, when suddenly the bad guys’ families show up.  It’s a picnic!  The good guys keep walking, taking position on a nearby hill and waiting for the picnic to end and the families to go home.  The bad guys enjoy their evening, even sending some food over to the good guys.  When the picnic’s over and the families leave, though, it’s no-kidding, Wild West shootout.  They all have honor, see?”

“I like it,” says Wai.  Is there any kind of narrative through-line you’d like to explore?”

“Pfft.  I’m producing four movies this year and directing one.  I don’t have time to write scripts.”

“Right,” replies Wai.  “Well, those sequences sound great, and I’m sure you have more up your sleeve.  I’ll gin up a revenge thriller around them and whaddaya say we start second unit filming on Monday?”

“Works for me.  Let’s use Vengeance as a working title.  I’m going to go storyboard my shootouts.  Have a good weekend, everybody.”

And so, I like to imagine, Vengeance was born.  The box says it’s about a very serious Frenchman who comes to Macau to wreak, well vengeance.  It’s really about the great Johnnie To creating cool action sequences.  Even better, it’s about the great Johnnie To (Election, The Heroic Trio) creating cool action sequences in Macau and Hong Kong, the Vegas and Manhattan of China.  Simon Yam (Ip Man & Ip Man 2) plays the villain and has great fun with the role.  Anthony Wong Chau-Sang (Infernal Affairs, Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor), Ka Tung Lam (Election, IP Man, Infernal Affairs), and Suet Lam (Shinjuku Incident, Kung Fu Hustle, Election) play the three assassins with hearts of gold and, if you follow Hong Kong cinema, those names are enough to put this movie on your queue right there.  Johnny Hallyday, whom Roger Ebert describes as a French combination of Elvis Presley and Charles Bronson, plays the Frenchman as a dour guy in a black suit, and his plastic surgery gives him an odd enough look to make him an interesting hero.

So what do have, here?  You have a good-enough story, reliable actors and stuntmen, and a string of very cool, very creative shootouts, chases, and action sequences.  In short, you have a terrific Hong Kong action thriller.  Vengeance is a winner.

After the Wedding

In After the Wedding, Mads Mikkelsen (Casino Royale, the exceptionally good and well worth seeing Flame and Citron) works in a Bombay orphanage.  He teaches school.  He looks after the kids.  He does fundraising.  He’s poor, but he’s noble and happy.  And he’s got that lean, tanned, Adventure Guy thing working for him.

One day, his boss calls him in and tells him he must fly to Copenhagen to meet with a deep-pockets philanthropist whose money they need to keep the orphanage open.  Mikkelsen doesn’t want to go, but he consents.

So far, so good.  I’m with him right up ‘til he tells one of his waifs, “I’ll be back in ten days, tops.  I promise I’ll be there for your birthday.”  See, I know this is a drama, so I know there was no way he’s going to make it back in time for that birthday.  I know the waif will guilt him out, I know he’ll feel badly about it, and I know that it’ll all be a part of the second-act crisis.  Suspension of disbelief = blown.

Once Mikkelsen gets to Denmark, the donor inexplicably invites him to attend a family wedding.  Surely, weddings were put on this earth as a test of loyalty, for they rank among the most crushingly dull of all ceremonies.  Loyal friends and relatives can reasonably be called upon to attend, but glancing acquaintances?  No way – that’s too much to ask.  So here am I, an audience member of this film, watching a crushingly boring wedding through the eyes of a glancing acquaintance.  Not only do I not believe in the proceedings on the screen before me, I’m looking at my watch. 

But hey, this movie’s called After the Wedding, so there’s gotta be some drama coming, right?  Well, yeah, but I know that it’ll all lead to Mikkelsen calling the sad-faced waif back in India and telling him sorry, he won’t make that birthday after all.  And I’m pretty sure nothing’s going to explode, because this doesn’t seem like that kind of movie.  So now, instead of catching myself up in the personal drama of Mikkelsen, the donor, and other attendees of the titular wedding, I’m just watching the plot’s gears turn and waiting for it to be over.

A lot of people, people whose opinions I respect, love this movie.  I stopped believing, like, ten minutes in, and that was it.  Seeing After the Wedding was like attending a wedding: an excruciatingly dull affair I endured out of loyalty.  Your mileage, of course, may vary.

Doctor Who: The Movie

Doctor Who is a British science fiction series about The Doctor (that’s his name), an alien who travels through time and space, rights wrongs, meets famous people, and has amazing adventures.  The show originally ran from 1963 to 1989, went off the air due to slipping ratings, and resumed in 2005.  It airs on BBC America and has become an unqualified, global hit.

In 1996, however, the show was basically dead.  But The Doctor is hard to kill, and thanks to an expatriate British tv producer in the US, it got a chance to relaunch in America.  Fox and the BBC teamed up to make a tv movie that could serve as a backdoor pilot, but Doctor Who: The Movie aired against the final show of the popular sitcom Roseanne.  It got crushed. 

Ok, enough history.  Is Doctor Who: The Movie any good?  Not really, no.  Eric Roberts, as the villainous Master, is all over the place – menacing one moment and campy the next.  Daphne Ashbrook and Yee Jee Tso, as the love interest and potential sidekick, respectively, don’t have enough charisma to keep up with Paul McGann as the Doctor.  The production’s too cheap to hold up, but not cheap enough to earn it a “good enough for tv” pass.

Now, on to the more important question: is it any good if you’re a fan of Doctor Who?  Sure.  The film stays in continuity with the old BBC tv series and is part of the continuity of the current iteration of ­Doctor Who, so it has plenty to offer those who keep up with such things.  McGann makes for a fine Doctor, the show strikes a decent balance between danger and whimsy, and the whole thing rocks along pleasantly for an hour and a half or so.

If you’re interested in checking out Doctor Who, don’t begin with Doctor Who: The Movie.  Instead, see the new-series episode “Silence in the Library,” available on Netflix streaming.  It’s as good as the show gets, and it just may hook you.  If you’re already hooked, Doctor Who: The Movie will fill in a gap and help scratch the itch until the next new episode.  It worked for me.

Megamind

Megamind is laugh-out-loud funny.

Here in the second paragraph, I usually describe the movie’s first act to give you a taste of what you’re in for.  You don’t the need that for Megamind.  Just know that it’s a cartoon about supervillain who’s not such a bad guy, once you get to know him.

This film looks great, with bright and colorful animation.  The story’s simple enough for toddlers, yet smart enough for parents.  The comedy balances slapstick and character-based humor to give everyone something to laugh at.  And the action sequences, well, they’re fantastic. 

I watched Megamind with my family (ages 2 - 43), and we all enjoyed it.  We laughed out loud, we got swept up in the characters, and we look forward to seeing it again.  Megamind is a winner.

The Lincoln Lawyer

In The Lincoln Lawyer, Matthew McConaughey plays a (mostly) shirt-wearing defense attorney of what we’d call the worst kind.  He rips off his clients, finds ways to get scumbags off the hook, and makes a lot of money.  This guy thinks he’s got it all figured out, until he takes a murder case with unexpected wrinkles.  Away we go.

I know what you’re thinking.  “Sounds like a disposable dime-store thriller.”  I won’t argue with you: The Lincoln Lawyer is a dime-store thriller.  Thing is, it’s a really good dime-store thriller.  The hero seems like a scumbag, but reveals hidden quality.  Marisa Tomei plays the love interest and, well, she’s Marisa Tomei.  The villain’s villainous, the plot twists and twists again, and at one point I genuinely couldn’t imagine how McConaughey was going to get out of his jam.  This film entertained and surprised me, and it wrapped up in a most satisfying way.  The Lincoln Lawyer shows what happens when a thriller’s done right.  I hope they make a sequel.

Cedar Rapids

In Cedar Rapids, Ed Helms plays what’s quickly becoming the Ed Helms character: a nerdy, uptight good guy who falls in with a bad crowd.  Hijinks ensue.  Valuable Life Lessons get learned.  Roll the credits.

Fine, fine.  The fish out of water is a comedic archetype for a reason: it often works.  Does it work here?  Well, ask yourself this question: do you find the concept of a guy who lives in Brown Valley, Wisconsin and works for Brown Star Insurance amusing?  If so, Cedar Rapids is for you.

Me, well, I didn’t laugh at that or any other joke in the movie.  It wasn’t that Ed Helms is a poor comedic actor or that the story didn’t flow.  It’s just that the jokes didn’t work for me.  I found Cedar Rapids to be genial company on a long flight in coach, but that was all.

Restrepo

Restrepo, a documentary about a year in the life of the soldiers manning Fire Base Restrepo in Afghanistan’s Khogal Valley, is phenomenal.  Expertly photographed and taughtly edited, it puts us right there in a valley that defines remote and isolated, and it helps us understand just what it is that we ask our young people to do when they don our country’s uniform and ship off to war.

Here’s the deal: National Geographic Channel made a deal with the U.S. Army to send a documentary team along with NAME OF UNIT on its # OF MONTHS deployment to Afghanistan.  The documentarians captured the daily lives of the soldiers at the firebase – their routines, their hijinks, their near-daily fighting with the Taliban enemy who controlled the valley before their arrival.  They also captured the unit on patrol -  cameramen Tim Heatherington and Sebastian Junger didn’t stay behind the wire – doing everything from trying to bond with the locals to fighting its way out of an ambush.

The effect?  We see these soldiers as real people, brave and afraid and risking their lives for an objective of questionable value.  This isn’t a movie about bugles and drums and soaring eagles.  It’s a movie about soldiers, low paid but well led, doing their best.  Restrepo is worth your time.

The Chaser

The Chaser is as good as thrillers get.

Here’s the setup: Joong-ho Eom is an ex-cop and a pimp.  He loans his women large sums of money; they work it off.  He’s running a good racket, but then his workers start disappearing.  He figures they’re running or being sold.  When he pressures one of his women to go out on a call and she disappears, he gives chase while the trail's still hot.

He’s about to find out that his women aren't running, but falling victim to a killer who’s even more evil than he.  He’s about to find out that his women are human beings.  In fact, he’s about to find out that he’s a human being. 

This is a great premise, and the film delivers with a clever structure and fantastic pacing that rockets along all the way through to the denoument.

Star Yun-seok Kim, as Joong-ho, finds a way to invest us in his evil pimp character.  As he navigates a world of well-intentioned but fallible police officers, untrusting and untrustworthy members of Seoul’s underworld, and the simple physical limitations of fatigue and stress, we both hang on his every move and root for his developing conscience.  Yeong-hi Seo as Young-min Jee, the woman whom Joong-ho pressured and whom he's now trying to save, creates a character with a combination of guts, vulnerability, and desperation that gives us a real, edge-of-our seats concern and fear for her well-being.  Finally, Jung-woo Ha, as the killer, delivers a bland insanity that gets under our skin and shocks us when he acts on his (impulses?) (needs?).

The Chaser takes these characters, puts them in a story that shifts among them as it develops, and creates the sense of urgency that comes from the certain knowledge that the clock could run out on anyone at any time.  I won't tell you how or even if it breaks that tension, but I will tell you that it sticks the landing.

If you like thrillers, you owe it to yourself to seek out The Chaser.  Be warned, however: this is a Korean movie, and Korean movies generally don't flinch.  If you're ok with that, stand by.

The Adjustment Bureau

In The Adjustment Bureau, Matt Damon falls for a charming young woman whom he is not supposed to love.  The Adjustment Bureau, the organization that ensures the universe progresses according to plan, gets very concerned.  Queue the running.

Ok, that’s fun.  The film overcomes the problem that nobody can run from God by having Him use the titular Bureau to enforce His will, then saddling it with a bunch of rules to make it inefficient.  This is a story about a guy who tries to exploit those inefficiencies to get his way.  But is it a good story?

It’s good enough.  It’s practically un-American to dislike Matt Damon, and I rooted for him here.  The Divine Enforcement Bureaucracy is a clever idea, and the film works it well.  The love interest is lovable, the story clips along nicely, and I enjoyed the whole thing.

But it’s been a week since I’ve seen it, and it’s already fading in my memory.  The Adjustment Bureau has no deep hooks, no big ideas, nothing to capture the imagination beyond a fun premise and professional execution.  It’s fine, but not fantastic.  How’s that for a lukewarm review?

Hiatus

Hi folks,

I'm in the middle of a move right now.  Thus, I don't have time to keep the blog up to date.  Please feel free to browse around - you may find something that piques your interest.

Ip Man 2

Ip Man 2, while not quite as good as Ip Man (reviewed here), still ranks as a thoroughly successful martial arts picture.

Donnie Yen reprises his role as Ip Man (Ip is his surname, Man his given name.  If he were in the US, he’d call himself Man Ip.).  He and his family are refugees in Hong Kong, their pre-war lives of affluence in mainland Foshun nothing but a memory.  The first film indicated that Ip was a smart businessman, but even a smart businessman needs a little starting capital.  For Ip, that means offering lessons in Wing Chun. 

Soon, Ip’s standing before a gathering of the martial arts masters of Hong Kong, offering to fight any challengers for the right to be called Master.  This is a fantastic sequence, even better than the film’s climactic fight against a cocky English boxer.  It combines comedy (two Masters conferring, “You wanna go first?”  “No, I think you should go first.”) with class and grace, showing us Masters fighting hard, but pulling their punches so as not to do any real damage.  The battles convey a sense of respect and sportsmanship, with Ip bowing to each defeated opponent and telling him, “Thank you for letting me win.”  When Sammo Hung himself, as the Big Boss, takes center stage against our protagonist, the film delivers a real treat.  Hung has always been a big boy – he was the “fat one” during his days at Peking Opera – and it’s a real delight to see a man who’s pushing 250 lbs trading moves with the younger, fitter Yen.

So if Ip Man 2 still has Donnie Yen and even puts fight choreographer and director Sammo Hung in front of the camera, why doesn’t it measure up to Ip Man?  Simply put, the stakes aren’t as high.  In Ip Man, the hero tries to keep his family alive during the Japanese occupation of China.  In Ip Man 2, he’s just another immigrant trying to make it in a new town.  Nobody’s pointing a gun at him.  Further, the fights use more wire work, which is a distraction in the quasi-realistic world Ip Man 2 tries to create.  Combine that with a greater reliance on fast-paced editing in the fight sequences, and we have a film that, rather than the brilliance of its predecessor, merely checks in as very very good.

But hey, I’ll take very very good every time.  Ip Man 2, while not a masterpiece, is still better than most martial arts films on the market.  I’d happily watch it again.